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She needed a goal in her life, she thought. Something to work toward.
She needed something to focus on.
the conviction that she had to give up smoking to accomplish her goal—
focused on changing just one habit—
By focusing on one pattern—what is known as a “keystone habit”—Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.
“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,”
The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives.
The second part examines the habits of successful companies and organizations.
third part looks at the habits of societies. It
there’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.”
The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making.
So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.
habits are surprisingly delicate.
He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.
First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.
Starbucks—like a handful of other companies—has succeeded in teaching the kind of life skills that schools, families, and communities have failed to provide.
At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower.
Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”
best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.
if a worker knows how to remain focused and disciplined, even at the end of an eight-hour shift, they’ll deliver the higher class of fast food service that Starbucks customers expect.
By the 1980s, a theory emerged that became generally accepted: Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say “thank you.”
Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”
“When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework or eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of what’s happening is that you’re changing how you think,”
“People get better at regulating their impulses. They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal.”
“When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength.
“We’re not in the coffee business serving people,” Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks, told me. “We’re in the people business serving coffee. Our entire business model is based on fantastic customer service. Without that, we’re toast.”
They identified simple cues and obvious rewards.
What employees really needed were clear instructions about how to deal with inflection points—
how to handle moments of adversity by giving them willpower habit loops.
“One of the systems we use is called the LATTE method. We Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred.
This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.
It trained me to set goals.
Simply giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.
Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.
“Much of firm behavior,” they wrote, is best “understood as a reflection of general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm’s past,” rather than “the result of a detailed survey of the remote twigs of the decision tree.”
firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.
These organizational habits—or “routines,” as Nelson and Winter called them—are enormously important, because without them, most companies would never get any work done.
Routines reduce uncertainty—a
All those leaders seized the possibilities created by a crisis.
During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.
reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold.
crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.
The only way to increase profits was to figure out each individual shopper’s habits and to market to people one by one, with personalized pitches designed to appeal to customers’ unique buying preferences.
this realization came from a growing awareness of how powerfully habits influence almost every shopping decision.
more than 50 percent of purchasing decisions occurred at the moment a customer saw a product on the shelf, because, despite shoppers’ best intentions, their habits were stronger than their written intentions.
“Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals,”
Why do some people suddenly change their shopping routines?
